#post commanders

The easiest way to figure out what rank you want someone to be is to decide how many people you want them to be in charge of. 

I like using this small tree to show people how you can do the math

Image from olive-drab.com, a good resource if you just wanna start diving through pages of military stuff.

Also a quick note: “barracks” just refers to the living quarters we sleep in, which are usually on an army post! If I’m understanding correctly, your soldier is the commander of the installation itself, so you’ll find more on google looking for either base or post commander.

Generally we consider an O-6, or a colonel, to be the standard post commander. As you can see on the chart above, colonels generally have command of a brigade, or 3000-5000 soldiers total. 

A smaller post we occupy (still in a city) is Suwon Air Base in South Korea. It’s not an army installation, it belongs to South Korea, and they have a chunk and we have a chunk and that’s how it is. It’s quite small and lacks most accommodations larger army posts are accustomed to. 6/52 (a battalion level unit) is the only U.S. unit there, and two of its five companies are housed on a separate installation. It doesn’t have family housing either. A few hundred people at best. Its “post commander” is an O-4, a lieutenant colonel, and he’s only the post commander in as much as he controls his unit and doesn’t let them fuck up Korea’s base. A larger post example is Fort Bliss, El Paso. El Paso is a surprisingly sprawling and bustling city with an entire other city plunked into it. Last population count was 33,000 (not all soldiers) with 1700 square miles of space. For land mass reference, that’s almost three Londons, or six New Yorks, or about twenty-four Washington, D.C.s. If I’m not mistaken it’s home to eight distinct army units (as well as two German) some at the Division level and some at the Brigade level, culminating in its post commander being an O-8, or major general. Not all of the people who live on Fort Bliss are in the U.S. military, but they’re still subject to the Post Commander’s rules and mandates as long as they live and work on the installation.So before I can help more you’d probably want to decide what kind of post it is, how big, how populous, and where, because U.S. occupied posts are always going to be much more populated than OCONUS (or “outside the continental/contiguous U.S.”) posts, and yes that includes Hawaii and Alaska.

Some last hints:-We can also use “garrison” as synonymous with “post,” particularly a permanent one belonging to the U.S. It has three syllables though and that’s a lot. -Posts named “Fort” were traditionally established as defensive garrisons, and posts named “Camp” were traditionally established to house the units. Over the years this has become a moot point and doesn’t matter lol but hey, maybe you can come up with cool history!-There are also two different types of post: the one I’ve spoken of here, (aka ”base” but that’s usually a Naval/Air term even we drop it sometimes) and “my/your/their post,” meaning your designated duty whether that means guard duty or dish duty. “Abandoning your post” does refer to leaving your place of duty, not leaving your installation. Going to the toilet could be abandoning your post.

I hope this gave you somewhere to get started!